Max Collins - Midnight Haul

“I didn’t catch you at the funeral.”

“I wasn’t there. I didn’t know her well enough to intrude on her family and friends. And, too, Annie would’ve been there.”

“Annie?”

“My ex-wife. Let’s not pretend you don’t know her. I’d like us to be more up front than that.”

The secretary, Sharen, brought the Pepsies in.

As she handed them around, she said, “I need to pick my son up after Scouts today. Do you mind if I leave a little early, Patrick?”

He glanced at his watch. “It’s four-fifteen now. Why don’t you just take off.”

She beamed at him. “Thanks.”

After she’d left, Patrick explained, “We don’t stand on ceremony around here. We like to keep it a bit, uh...”

“Informal?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Boone...”

“Patrick.”

“Patrick, then. I know your ex-wife. I won’t pretend I don’t. I just didn’t know anybody called her ‘Annie.’ ”

“Well, she’s taken to being called just ‘Boone,’ these days. Some kind of feminist stand, I suppose. But if that’s the case, why not revert to her maiden name?”

“Probably because she’s raising your son.”

“You’re probably right. Well. I suppose you know why I asked you to stop by.”

“Not really.”

“I know what Annie’s up to. Oh, maybe not exactly, I don’t. But I know it’s another one of her articles. Or maybe it’s a series of articles.”

He paused, perhaps hoping for Crane to enlighten him.

When Crane didn’t, Patrick went on: “She’s been asking questions around Greenwood for months. Researching Kemco. Trying to catch us doing something she doesn’t approve of. Which won’t be hard, considering anything any chemical company does would be something she wouldn’t approve of.”

“Maybe.”

“Then you won’t deny she’s rather narrow-minded on the subject?”

“Well...”

“Surely the basis of her hatred of Kemco is apparent to you.”

Crane said nothing.

“It’s me , Crane. It’s me she hates. Kemco’s a surrogate. Or scapegoat or whatever you want to call it. A perfect target for her outdated late ’60s/early ’70s radical liberalism.”

“Didn’t you used to lean that way yourself?”

“Of course. Didn’t you?”

“No.”

“Well, then, but you’re younger, aren’t you, so that explains it. Almost everybody on college campuses in those days felt that way. You would’ve had to live through the draft to understand. It was a valid enough point of view in its day, naive as it may have been. Some of us, like Annie, stay stuck in time. Some of us move on.”

“Move on and sell out?”

He grinned, swigged the can of Pepsi, pushed back in his swivel chair. “For somebody who sold out, I lead a pretty drab existence, wouldn’t you say?” he said, gesturing around an office that was four paneled walls and a couple of framed photos, one of the plant, the other of the home office in St. Louis. “All I make is a little over thirty grand a year, a goodly chunk of which goes to Ms. Woman’s Lib of 1969.”

“You’re young. You’re moving up in the company.”

“I will be. What’s wrong with that? Don’t you believe in capitalism, Crane?”

“The problem is I do. I do believe in it, and it pisses me off when I see it get twisted up.”

“Boy, you have been listening to Annie, haven’t you? She can be persuasive, I know. What kind of horror stories has she been telling you?”

“About you, or about Kemco?”

“Crane. Please. I want you to know something. I want you to know that I understand where you’re coming from. Or at least I think I do. Hope I do. Shouldn’t presume that I do, really. But I’m guessing that you took Mary Beth’s suicide hard. That you found it hard to believe anyone as full of life as Mary Beth could end that life, voluntarily.” He stopped and rubbed his forehead. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to sound so trite. To sound like I’m trivializing this. Christ. May I go on?”

“Yes.”

“I think you ran into Annie. Possibly at the funeral, or maybe later at Mary Beth’s mother’s home, or whatever. And Annie filled your head with her crazy leftist lunacy. Normally you might not have bought it. But it was easier accepting what Annie was saying than accepting Mary Beth’s death as suicide. I’m not far wrong, am I?”

Crane said nothing.

“I know that you’ve been asking some questions,” Patrick said. “I know that you have some suspicions.”

He’d been right: it was Mrs. Meyer. Patrick did not know about the trip to Pennsylvania last night. Did he?

“There are some disturbing statistics,” Patrick was saying. “We’re aware of the number of suicides in Greenwood; we’re aware of some illnesses that may be related to Kemco employees and their families. We’ll be looking into it ourselves.”

“I’ll look forward to that investigation.”

Patrick smiled sadly and shook his head. “She’s really poisoned you, hasn’t she? Don’t you see it? Don’t you see that this is a family squabble? That Annie is getting at me through the company I work for? I sold out, remember? It’s not enough to attack me. She has to attack the institutions I sold out to.”

“All because the poor kid’s stuck in time.”

“That’s right. It’s the ’80s now, Crane, in case you haven’t noticed. Damn near the ’90s, chilling thought though that is.”

“I noticed.”

“How close to her are you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I understand you’re staying at her house.”

“I’m just crashing there.”

“Crashing. There’s a Woodstock-era word for you. Did she tell you why we split up?”

“No.”

“Drugs.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was doing drugs. Nothing much. Some hash. Some coke.” His frankness was surprising, if somehow smug.

“You buy coke on thirty grand a year?”

He shrugged. “I dealt a little on the side. That upset her, too. Almost as much as me wearing a suit to work.”

“She said she wasn’t into drugs.”

“She’s lying. Oh, she isn’t now . But back in our college days, she was deep in it, deeper than me. She dropped acid like you take Alka Seltzer.”

“I don’t take Alka Seltzer.”

“Well you get my point. Then she reformed. There’s nothing worse than a reformed anything . She got on her health-food kick. She read books and articles on the bad effects of acid. Same with pot, for Christsake. Said it ruined brain tissue, affected the sexual organs, some bullshit. I don’t know. But she turned fanatic. I tried to do right by her. I stopped dealing. It was dangerous for me, anyway, now that I was with the company. I needed a straighter life-style. So no more coke, no more anything except smoke a little dope now and then. But even that was too much for her. I remember saying to her, the last generation liked its martinis, right? Well I like my pot. But that didn’t cut it with her, because alcohol’s on her shit list, too. It was like living with a religious fanatic. The screaming fucking arguments we had. Christ. But that’s neither here nor there. It got to be too much.”

“It broke up your marriage.”

“Yeah. She was on a real guilt trip, and believe me, it all ties in with what she’s doing now, where Kemco is concerned. She’s worried she fucked up her chromosomes dropping acid. She’s worried about Billy. The repercussions her doper days will have on our son.”

“Aren’t you worried?”

“No. I don’t believe that alarmist bullshit. But she does.”

“I’ll tell you something. Maybe Boone’s motivation for all this does stem from her hating you. But I’ve been reading up on some of your precious chemical industry, and some of what I read scares me.”